Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [33]
The beatnik’s pad is the modern equivalent of the poet’s garret in every way except the creation of poetry. Our well-oiled machinery of cultural exploitation provides those who are Different with lecture dates, interviews, fellowships, write-ups, and fans of both sexes (the word’s derivation from “fanatics” is clearer in these circles than among the more restrained enthusiasts of baseball, possibly because the latter have a technical knowledge rarely found among the former). The machinery tempts them to extremes since the more fantastic their efforts, the more delighted are their Midcult admirers. “Pour épater les bourgeois” was the defiant slogan of the nineteenth-century avant-gardists but now the bourgeoisie have developed a passion for being shocked. “If possible,” Kerouac advises young authors, “write without ‘consciousness’ in a semi-trance,” while a prominent advanced composer has written a piece for Twelve Radios that is performed by turning each to a different station, a sculptor has exhibited a dozen large beach pebbles dumped loosely on a board, a painter has displayed an all-black canvas only to be topped by another who showed simply—a canvas. At last, one hears the respectful murmurs, The Real Thing! The avant-garde of the heroic period generally drew the line between experiment and absurdity—Gertrude Stein was the chief exception. Efforts like the above were limited to the Dadaists, who used them to satirize the respectable Academic culture of their day. But the spoofs of Dada have now become the serious offerings of what one might call the lumpen-avant-garde.
XVI
At this point, a question may be asked, and in fact should be asked, about the remarkable cultural change that has taken place since 1945. Statistically, a very good case can be made out that in the last fifteen years or so there has been a more widely diffused interest in High Culture than ever before in our history. The cause is the same as that for the development of Midcult, namely, the accelerating increase in wealth, leisure and college education. All three have been growing at an extraordinary rate since 1945, especially the last. Although the population between eighteen and twenty-one has increased only 2 per cent in the last ten years, college enrollment has almost doubled. There are now as many postgraduate students as there were undergraduates when I went to college in the late ’twenties. This enormous college population—one must add in several hundred thousand teachers—is the most important fact about our cultural situation today. It is far bigger, absolutely and relatively, than that of any other country. Some of its potentialities are being realized, but the most important—the creation and support of a living culture on a high level—is as yet hardly embryonic and perhaps never will come to birth. For this would mean drawing that line between Masscult and High Culture which the rise of Midcult has blurred. And there is something damnably American about Midcult.
Let us begin with the positive statistics. Since 1945 we have seen the following. The rise of the “quality” paperback, retailing at 95¢ up and presenting, at a third or less the cost of the original hard-cover edition, everything from Greek myths to the best contemporary scholars, critics and creative writers. The sales of classical records, now about a fourth of total record sales and actually equal in dollar volume to Rock ’n Roll. The proliferation throughout the country of symphony orchestras (there are now 1,100, double the 1949 number, and every city of 50,000 has one), local art museums (2,500 as against 600 in 1930), and opera-producing groups (there are now 500, a seven-fold increase since 1940). The extraordinary success of Noah Greenberg’s Pro Musica Antiqua group, which specializes in medieval and Early Renaissance music, is a case in point. The increase in “art” movie theaters, from 12 in 1945 to over 600 in